Jimmy The Grunt’s out there. It’s the 1st of December 1980. The music is coming through all muffled and Jimmy’s selling these Christmas ornaments, these mini Santas, these wee silver angels, and then I spot these decorations, these things on strings that you hang from your tree. Would you take a fucking look at that, Barney, I says to him, it’s fucking plastic bullets. It’s fucking plastic bullets all painted in the colours of Christmas. Are you selling fucking festive plastic bullets, you daft cunt? Barney says to him and he picks a handful up, but Jimmy just grunts. That’s fucking beezer, that is, Barney says, shaking his head. Tommy would have loved that, he says. Then he gives me this big bear hug. God love the Irish, he says to me, and he helps me into my taxi, and I head off, into the night.

*

All the way home I’ve got one of these feelings, one of these feelings of me and Tommy duetting, behind the scenes, and dancing to this silent music, as I sees myself in that bad bastard Danny Whitaker, and I shoots him in the face, and become like the sun.

*

We’re driving through Belfast and it’s so – quiet. It’s so – peaceful. I pictured everybody lying in their beds as we passed the houses in the dark and the roofs coming off, and the walls giving way, and all the glass coffins, stretching off into forever, in the streets of Belfast, is prisoners in Ireland, is poor suffering souls.

I’ll miss the women the most, I says out loud to myself, I don’t know why I says that then. The ladies of my life all dancing through my mind, in the late times, is the answer, I think. How, where is it you’re off to, Xamuel? the driver he says to me, young boy name of Connell, I knew his family. I wish I had made more room for women in my life, I says to him. That’s all I’m saying. This is fucking Belfast, mate, the boy Connell says, there’s a fucking drought on women, he says, which is why we’re all fighting amongst ourselves. If we could get to the end of all this fighting, he says to me, then all of the women would come back. And what a time that will be. All the women, coming back to Ireland; then you’ll see. What, along with all the snakes? I says to him. Aye, that too, he says, that too.

*

The taxi drops me to outside the house. As I hobble to the front door, I drop my keys, and now as I’m trying to bend down to pick them up, there’s a voice, calling, from somewhere in the distance: Xamuel, is that Yourself? it says. Aye, it’s me, I says to this voice, but I’m struggling with my keys. I’m just struggling, I says. I’m just making sure it’s you, says this voice from the air, and it sounds like my old neighbour, Billy McNab. Sure is that yourself, Billy McNab? But there’s no answer. Nobody comes to help, so as I’m left to struggle on my own.